Everyone is here to teach Mike Watt

PHOTO by JOHN GILHOOLEY

Sitting at new Sacred Grounds, looking back at old Sacred Grounds: Watt two weeks from 50 years old with just the same eyes as in the mirror on Double Nickels but behind bifocals now, clapping handshakes with the exact man who shot that album cover—face, speedometer, sign saying SAN PEDRO all in the same frame—who happened to show up exactly as the interview opens. “That’s Pedro!” says Watt, who used to tour with the name of the town spray-painted on his bass, and people up in Hollywood thought it was his own name; he later wrote a song for his first opera called “Pedro Bound” that I think meant connection as much as direction.

And now you too can spot Watt peddling or paddling (his phrase) perimeters each early morning before pasting bass into projects young (Funanori, Japanese for “sailor”) and mature (Missingmen, playing this Friday and Saturday) and punk-divine (Stooges) as he prepares for his third Watt-opera, an installment to follow Contemplating the Engine Room (Watt the young man between D. Boon and dad) and The Secondman’s Middle Stand (Watt and the illness that tried to kill him) by peering into middle years with all the monsters who populate Bosch paintings. (Possibly it will be called Twenty And Ten is Not Fifty, he says . . . )

Wattspiel comes like Watt music—Minutemen write rivers, not songs, he told Flipside as a young man, and he still talks that same way, with every thought hot out loud as soon as he’s got it and smacking the laptop when he needs a punctuation mark. I tried to buy him tacos before; I tried to get him coffee today—anything, Watt, because I’m biting time off you, but he just does a funny handshake where he cups my hand the way you light a cigarette in the wind and walks away, and then spins back quick, scooping out his pocket. “New batch,” he says, with a pile of Watt stickers (“the man in the van w/a bass in his hand”) and there goes Watt again, two weeks from 50 and making sure I leave with a little more than what I had.

You used to read the electric meters in Long Beach.
For Edison in the late ’70s. I remember Solidarity was going on in Poland. I wrote a poem about it: ‘I never gave a damn/about the meter man/til I was the man/who read the meters, man.’ I had a lot of time to think!

And your first show was T. Rex at the Municipal Auditorium.
I was 14 and D. Boon’s pop took us and sat with us. He wanted to take us because we were still boys. His pop, Danny, was from Nebraska and lived a lot in Bakersfield and he didn’t know anything about T. Rex. When I met D. Boon, all he knew was Creedence. That was his only rock band. I turned him on to the Who, Alice Cooper, T. Rex, Cream, Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult . . .

The glam and spandex bands?
For us, T. Rex—Marc Bolan seemed like John Fogerty. Boa, flannel, same thing.

Did you ever meet John Fogerty?
He wrote me a note when Boon was killed. ‘To Mike Watt: Keep on keepin’ on.’

And now you’re working on your middle-of-life album.
This is the Black Gang record, with Nels Cline and Bob Lee—they don’t even know the music! It’s kind of a riff on fall and autumn. I kinda think I’m turning 50, and 50 is kind of autumn—it ain’t winter, it ain’t spring—it’s late summer! And I like the word. In the US, we use ‘fall’ and ‘autumn.’ After summer is the fall . . . and my birthday is right around the solstice. This year, the solstice falls on the day D. Boon was killed. The worst day of my life. I always try to think of him on his birthday—April Fool’s—I like it better than that other day. Starting things, not things ending. There’s a Japanese version of We Jam Econo—besides the US one, there’s a Japanese one with subtitles. Shimmy—an incredible musician in Japan that had me record with him and his wife last summer in Tokyo—was watching it while waiting to pick me up for the session. We let that come out because maybe if people see me and Boon make a band, they’ll think anybody can make a band! We were outta tune, hollering with four broken strings, but there was some kind of spirit or something. For me, it was a very personal thing with D. Boon. For other cats to pick that up, it really surprised me—I’m glad more than ever we put that out. The Minutemen were so about being in the moment—we never thought of the future and archiving and documents. We never thought of it meaning shit down the road. Now I’m glad—you can hear D. Boon play.

You know the Beefheart commandments for guitar?
Like ‘wear a hat’?

What are the Watt commandments for bass?
That’s the first time I’ve ever been asked that. The bass has got some righteous karma and politics—you look good making other cats look good, and the more notes you play, the littler you get. It’s an eternal struggle for the right notes. Which I think should never be solved. I guess it’s the singers and guitar players who get to go after millions of notes. A lot of people ask me what to do—you have that now. In the old days, there was a huge hierarchy and bass is where you put your retarded friend, the right-field little leaguer—in punk, everybody was lame, so the bass equaled out. So I try to tell them . . . ‘A lot of times you ain’t gonna be the one writing the songs, but there are a lot of ways to do it.’ The instrument is still in a stage of mystery and self-realization. So it’s really to get into your own personal experience of the thing. You’re dealing with big-ass strings and a spectrum of frequency that’s felt more than it’s heard. It looks like a guitar but it’s much different in a lot of ways—it’s more like a kick drum. That’s the closest note. There’s a kind of a stereotype and cliché about the persona.

The strong silent type?
Or the mother. Which I kind of went against. I didn’t know! In the old days at concerts—the P.A. was used for singing mainly, and they had to run sound off the stage. That’s why you see all those amps! I couldn’t even tell you what Creedence were playing—the guys I could hear were John Entwistle and Jack Bruce and then the R&B guys—James Jamerson, Larry Graham—you could hear the bass! When the Minutemen came, D. Boon thought to put political ideas into music—before punk, music was like building models—kind of like the real thing. The idea of using it as a vehicle for expression—that was never in our mind! But the idea—what was in our head was what we’d do songs about! D. Boon put such a profound experience on us. Even the way we put together the band—we destroyed all the hierarchy. Not two guys supporting the lead guitar aristocracy. Make ’em all equal. He got really trebly and left all this room for me, so my early experience with Bruce and Entwistle—that was more compounded by the way Boon wanted to organize the sound. The bass and guitar and drums all pushed up front and people taking their turns—that was reflecting the scene. The guy on stage, after he’s done—he’s talking to you! It’s not like arena rock—the altar and pews, descend to give us a good time—that all went out the window! That’s me and my buddy and the profound experience of punk! But it was the personal experience I had between getting this fucking machine to laugh and cry, and my life and the way I was sensing and feeling it . . . this thing in a certain way was like a reed out in the bayou, the way the breeze blows on it and resonated it. Your personal experience in life should be the way it gets operated, and there ain’t any correct way. It’s almost a religious ethic. You wanna serve the tune. There’s something righteous about the song—I think people like it a little better than listening to speeches. There’s something transcendent about music, and the idea of serving the tune . . . but everybody’s got their own way! I have to admit, when I go into a club, the first dude I look at is the bass player. Nine out of 10 times, he didn’t write the song. He had it handed to him—so how does he serve the tune and get his person in there? His thumbprint? Because in a way, he’s grout. In the bathroom, people look at the tile—I look at the grout! That’s the way I relate to the bass, too. I don’t try to be too definitive. It’s funky about the bass. I see a guy with a righteous bassline and I wanna meet him—‘I really like that bassline!’ And I find out the guy’s been playing two months because his buddy made him! That’s how righteous it is! You can write good basslines when you’re just starting. It’s not the most notes—it’s the right notes! You can create drama and tension and release, but in the long run the best basslines are really econo. Human experience is always ‘more, more, more.’ You’re riding the bike and pretty soon you’re doing wheelies—but isn’t it more important where you fucking ended up taking that bike?

Is that why you still play?
I haven’t even tried five-string bass—I stay at four string! There’s enough possibilities right there. Like in the twenties when you know everything, but when you get a little further down the line—you learn how to ask questions. I saw a documentary with Rashied Ali, and he was saying he couldn’t understand why Trane’s always practicing! At the airport, he’s got the flute—pulls it out! If the guy’s so good, why would he do this? But the way I see it—Trane gets on a motif and gets some of it and that leads to other possibilities, and that leads to other possibilities—an onion unpeeling—it never ends! That’s what I try to do with bass. Drummer Stephen Hodges told me—being a little scared is like being a little excited. That’s what I do—get a pants-shitter thing, like, ‘Whoa, what do I do?’ In some ways, it’s like never growing up, and it’s always kind of scary.

Do you feel like you’re grown up now?
I don’t know! That shit gets so relative! Like the Stooges—I’m finally the youngest guy in the band. The little brother—a role I’ve never been! Even though I’ve played all these gigs—through all these years, I find out I still got tons to learn. They’re sensei, they’re big teachers! I got to this age where I discovered that everybody’s got something to teach me. D. Boon put me on bass—I wasn’t really the musician type. To me it was more like, ‘Now I’m hanging out with D. Boon!’ Music is a very personal thing—I don’t know if I ever got away from music being a personal thing. When I was a young kid, I thought it was some kind of science that these blessed people who had the right formulas and the right breedings . . . the same way poems or books or all this shit, I thought it all reduced down to formulas. I’ve been re-reading a lot of books I read when I was younger and I hear the writer’s voice a lot more. And all these other things—syntax, rules, regulations, all this shit—they’re not at the heart of the matter. They’re baggage the human experience brings around—or that the marketing people use to make their job easier. But the real thing is the fucking life! The human spirit!

How do you feel two weeks from 50?
It’s the middle, all right, and your body gets a little creakier—but even with that I wouldn’t trade it for being young and stupid! I’m not saying other people were young and stupid—I was! I’m keeping my mind open, letting everyone on the planet get a shot at teaching me—that’s hard! The ego wants to get in the way! ‘I been there! I know this!’ No, you haven’t—you had traces. . . . Something I thought in my memory was so clear—in a new situation, it turns out all differently how I remembered it. I was convinced those were accurate memories. Like Joyce said—history is a nightmare I’m trying to wake up from. Lot of it is self-rationalized shit—schmaltzy sentimentalism, shit you never wanna forget, but do you ever remember it right? Every time I play bass, I know part of D. Boon is in there. I think of the old days—you gotta bring something to the gig that’s creative or you’re letting down the scene! D. Boon—it was such a personal connection—he’d make notes and rhythms mean more than notes and rhythms to me. He was so generous with me on this personal level—‘Yeah, play with me!’ That’s different than being 3rd chair in music. I graduated in ’76 when punk happened—that was a lucky situation—meeting Black Flag handing out flyers at a gig in ’79. We couldn’t believe there was a punk show in Pedro and they couldn’t believe there was a punk band IN Pedro! Lucky! I think even my father being a sailor and telling me the stories of the Navy and going to sea—that got me excited for touring! I’d read interviews with rock stars who hated touring—and we did our first tour and it seemed righteous! Go to the other towns—we could have never done that! We were econo—working people! My pop was telling me stories and he didn’t have punk bands—he joined Sam’s band! He told me never to join. That’s how he’d see the world. But he told me, ‘You’re kind of like a sailor.’ Anyway, the third opera—inspired by the creatures in Bosch paintings. I just found out all the little creatures were visualizations of aphorisms and proverbs—but I didn’t know so I made up my own. Bosch—he seems so outside! I know hardly anything about the cat but his paintings are so bizarre—an outside guy trying to get a handle on the thing! In a way, middle age is kind of like that—re-evaluating. I’m blessed to be riding bass. Really it ain’t me, in a lot of ways—I’ve met a lot of happening people in music. There’s a lot of cats looking for a new angle to adjust their tiara to, but these are dudes who were bit by the bug and love to play.

Pedro has a lot of talent.
Isn’t that a trip? In the Minutemen days the scene was tiny-ass! I think punk opened a door. I relate a lot of shit to Pedro. I dig this town a lot. It helps me appreciate other towns. We can’t all live in the same place. That’s the reason towns spring up. Dines, Wyoming—the coal town my mom grew up in, a ghost town—the company shut it down so she was a teenager in Peoria where they make Caterpillar tractors—there’s reasons for all this shit! Pedro’s righteous. And Long Beach. Punk is really conducive to homegrown—just put it on in your living room or garage—its own version. A lot of it is about inventing or re-inventing yourself, which I think is happening. I always wanna be part of it, no matter where’s the circumstance with hair and wrinkles. I was born the year Sputnik came out—I think it means ‘traveling companion.’ A really funny name. I’ve been reading a lot of Murakami—just read Sputnik Sweetheart—he’s a trippy writer! I guess he writes in Japanese and it all gets translated over—you never know the sense of things. But some of the point is just getting drunk on the words and ideas. Sort of what I learned through Milan Kundera. Something I always used in my music is reading—something about fiction. The written word I got so much respect for—all of a sudden, they’re writing a book about you! You’re absorbing symbols into making sense—of course your own life goes into it. Even going back to Double Nickels—a lot of songs on there are my experience with James Joyce’s Ulysses. I know it might be weird I’m bringing up someone like Trotsky, but he had the idea of the concept of permanent revolution being a pen knife, but the art wasn’t in the knife—it was what could be carved with the knife. That’s the way I look at punk. It’s not the end-all—it’s just some fucking springboard for ideas, and that’s why for me I can be a punk rocker forever! Looking over at D. Boon—he wants to try it, and maybe . . . there’s room! Joey Ramone told me—punk is like a big wagon, and if you had ideas, there was room and you could get on board. My band at the time—Mike Watt and the Crew of the Flying Saucer—were at RFK Stadium, some bullshit radio prostituting gig, and here is Joey Ramone talking to me before we go on about the about the big wagon and ‘get on board!’—the sweetest cat! And Johnny, too—even Dee Dee—I got to play with those guys at the Warner theater next door, where me and D. Boon saw The Exorcist, and I shit a pecan log watching that one . . . I remember Joey talking to me not as a wizened old man, but like a notion came to him, and here’s one of the original daddies! Or Richard Hell taking me to Central Park and asking me to tell him about Dante—this guy, my first punk bass player, and first he took me to the Guggenheim where they had a thing on German Expressionism, and then he took me to the park, and then we talked free will and determinism. . . . Or Iggy just called me on Thanksgiving and wanted to talk about Coltrane because that movie on Albert Ayler was out . . . all this shit keeps me a permanent kid! Me telling Richard Hell about Dante! It’s a world of possibility, but you don’t know what’s coming up—sure is fucking interesting! Last year, this lady won a game show—she’s a big pop star and I got asked so much stuff about it. Kelly Clarkson—good singer, never been in a band, learned to sing in church. The guy she’s writing songs with is the guy I’m gonna make the autumn record with Nels. The idea that people got it all figured out—what a dry-ass static world that would be! Even though society sets up the ideal is giving orders, real life is about taking turns—being a bass player, I always should have known! I can’t re-invent my Minutemen boy life—that was taken from me. Keeping it open. That’s how I try to keep relevant on the bass.

What do you still want to learn? 
I have my diaries on hootpage—I would like to try and learn writing better—I just love it, man! Something about literature is just incredible—I’m just a retard about getting thoughts out of my head! It’s really an art—and painting! All the arts—I see Raymond [Pettibon] doing paintings and it’s such an inspiration. The most musical part of writing in a way is poems—I’ve tried some of that shit and done four or five readings, and they’re total pants-shitters! They make a gig like nothing! So scary! Going back to me and D. Boon and thinking about the world and the way to make a band—I think we really did think everybody was some kind of artist! Wouldn’t you want the guy rebuilding your carburetor to be inspired? Going back to the boss thing—you want to inspire them! ‘This is gonna be the best carburetor rebuild—all my intuition, creative ways, all my experience, I’m gonna bring right to this gig here!’ But there’s the other thing—working for the weekend, and the key to life is where you’re doing nothing, and is that really the end-all? No! It’s proving to each other we’re alive! That’s what I try and get myself caught up in. There’s something about somebody with passion who’s fired-up and driven—the bug! Those are the people that excited me—luckily I never grew up over that.

What will you do on your birthday?
It is Thursday, so I will be paddling. And I will be playing with Banyan—Nels Cline on one side and Stephen Perkins, what men in love with music—to be playing between them guys, what a gift! All the time in the old days, I used to never tell people—I’d never celebrate, and it’d just pass. That’s how I’d be—get away with my birthday and no one would know. But a lady Nels used to live with—Carla Bozulich—hers was on Christmas Eve, and she was like, ‘Come to my house and we’ll celebrate together.’ I had this stuck-up attitude in my twenties, like I had one birthday! All this perception thing—if the Berlin Wall was just a solid physical trip, you could take a hammer to it, but the walls are actually in the head! I had my shares of them—I wanna knock them all down, pave them over, turn them into farmland. Or bayou! That was a very northwest bayou for John Fogerty—actually, he’s from Porterville when they were kids, and that’s why they got that song. I thought this year was gonna be the first Halloween I wasn’t playing, but Thurston [Moore] said ‘Open for me in Visalia, and play a 10-minute version of Mose Allison’s “Young Man Blues”’—ironic!—so I found a pumpkin at a patch on the way there, and cut out the bottom and cut out eyes and a mouth, and with a flannel you’re like Ichabod Crane, and I did a 10-minute Mose Allison—like John Entwhistle on Live at Leeds like me and D. Boon learned it! I carved it and you couldn’t see shit—must have been some sour-ass notes! I was thinking of D. Boon, who had to be laughing at this—a pumpkin on my head in Visalia. Thurston’s helped me so much over different things—Ciccone Youth, had me play on Evol—that cat is kind of like Raymond—incredible depth of knowledge—but different from Raymond. We’re all different Raymonds, different Thurstons—we all got something to teach Watt! That’s the only thing in common! In my perfect world, everyone is here to teach me—I am  a student for life!

MIKE WATT WITH BANYAN PLUS ALFAJERK AND HORRORS OF TOLEDO DIPIAZZA’S | 5205 PACIFIC COAST HWY | LONG BEACH 90804 | THURS DEC 20 | CONTACT VENUE FOR TIME AND COVER  21+ | DIPIAZZAS.COM AND HOOTPAGE.COM

Tags: 50th birthday, d boon, dipiazza's, jamming econo, Long Beach, mike watt, San Pedro, the minutemen